Posts by SD2

Re: Firewire

Ah, yeah. A little googling shows nobody else mentioning 6 Firewire ports, only the six Thunderbold 2 slots. The story's text should be amended.

As for the Thunderbolt ports - they can be useful since they are such high speed, although this method of connectivity is hardly ubiquitous, and I think most will have a USB3 adapter attached.

Re: the customer is always wrong

I run an Atom D510 as a "micro" server. I found the problem to be the bandwidth bottleneck of the CPU/Motherboard combo.

For me, it peaks at about 180* Mb/s through any combination of ports (Ethernet; built-in SATA; RAID card on PCI-E; PCI card on PCI). Now while that may seem plentyful, certain combinations were even slower (PCI --> PCI-E).

While the specific number is probably a motherboard limitation, the limited cpu bandwidth (in the form of PCI-E lanes) and associated motherboard support is probably the problem. This issues does not appear to be addressed in this new generation cpus.

* - To those noting that the gigabit is only capable of about 120 Mb/s anyway, I'd like to point out that the maximum network throughput when reading from disk for me was just shy of 80 Mb/s, and the 180 Mb/s figure was from SATA to PCI-E RAID. Meanwhile, network card was perfectly capable to read to and from RAM at close to 100 Mb/s.

Re: ubuntu

I dream of such a day, but don't believe it will happen.

Even if it does happen, it will have only limited traction, since most of the porting to specific devices will have to be done by the users, not manufacturers.